In September 2017, in the aftermath of the atrocities at Manchester Arena and a subsequent 500% rise in Islamophobic hate crimes, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham established the Greater Manchester Tackling Hateful Extremism and Promoting Social Cohesion Commission. On 30th July...
The United Nation (UN)’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy, Professor Joseph Cannataci, has added his voice to the chorus of UN representatives raising concerns over PREVENT, recommending that the UK Government quickly investigates the impact of the counter-terrorism strategy. The...
On the 4th June 2018, the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, set out the UK’s updated Counter-Terror strategy: “CONTEST: the United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering Terrorism”. The report outlines changes to be made to the UK’s current counter-extremism strategy, CONTEST in an effort to...
The United Nation (UN)’s Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, has released a statement slamming the UK’s counter-extremism strategy, PREVENT, for being “inherently flawed” and has raised “very serious human rights...
In the latest series of backlashes against the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy, PREVENT, academics from SOAS, UCU and UNISON have signed a statement urging the SOAS Board of Trustees to vote down the implementation of PREVENT-minded strategies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)....
A recent article in the Middle East Monitor reports on how 30 students from the University of Westminster group ‘Students Not Suspects’ marched on the 6th of April, in protest of the manner in which PREVENT is being forced upon educational settings. The PREVENT duty, made compulsory by the...
Statistics released by the Home Office today, Tuesday 27th of March, continue to depict the worrying nature of the PREVENT duty as casting an unnecessarily wide net which is devoid of meaningful detail and which results in unacceptable numbers of unwarranted referrals. In other words, due to the...
A report by Warwick University has found that four NHS mental health trusts (of 54) are being used as Prevent surveillance to screen all patients of radicalisation and states that there is “evidence to suggest that the mentally ill are being inappropriately stigmatised as terrorism risks”. The...
What is Prevent? Prevent is one of four strands of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, known as Contest. The other strands are: Prepare; Protect; and Pursue. Prevent is designed to support people at risk of joining extremist groups and carrying out terrorist activities. The question...
The Government’s latest figures on the controversial Prevent and Channel policies have been released, indicating that the expansion of the policies are continuing to have a disproportionate impact on Muslims. A total of 7,631 people were subject to a Prevent referral in 2015-16, with less than 1...
